We are happy to share excerpts from an excellent article by Will Jennings (*Wallpaper), which addresses installations by Nadia Huggins (A shipwreck is not a wreck) and Tessa Mars (A call to the ocean)— curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel— at Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza’s TBA21 exhibition in Venice, Ocean Space. This exhibition will be on view at Chiesa di San Lorenzo until November 2, 2025.
That Venice is slowly sinking into the lagoon is well known. Each year, the water laps a little higher up the historic buildings and technological solutions are proposed to slow the impact of climate breakdown on one of the world’s most important cultural sites. Culture, especially that across the city’s biennales, is often used to discuss the importance of recognising climate issues or to ‘raise awareness’ of crises we collectively face (as if most of the planet wasn’t already acutely aware), but not many organisations actively enmesh their cultural offer with direct action.
TBA21, established by philanthropist and art patron Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza in 2002, is based in Madrid with an experimental exhibition space in the basement of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. From the outset intended as a platform for advocacy, education, and outreach as well as art, it presents projects across the world, including in one of Venice’s grandest spaces for exhibition.
Ocean Space is TBA21’s Venetian offer, located within the Chiesa di San Lorenzo, a 16th-century church with such immense internal height that upon entering, visitors immediately whiplash their heads back to look upwards. With the quality of light and sense of depth within, the feeling has something of the sense of looking up to the surface from an ocean bed, a quality built on by A shipwreck is not a wreck, Nadia Huggins’ sculpture, sound and video work that invites visitors to recline on the floor under an upended hull skeleton, amongst coral, rocks, sea creatures, and bodies. ‘We’re on the sea floor, and the ceiling projection looks at these people swimming overhead – it gives a 360 view of being underwater,’ Huggins says of a work both disorientating but also deeply relaxing.
Huggins’ work speaks to colonial and oceanic histories and how the ocean may inform not only how humans may respect subaquatic ecologies, but also offer lessons for how we could work better in our own world. Ocean Space is split by a double-sided altar with openings that allow sight and sound to travel between, with sculptural paintings by Tessa Mars standing in the other side of the chasmal space. Mars’ A call to the ocean is a series of theatre-style flats onto which the artist has painted mountain landscapes, perhaps landscapes submerged under oceans, unseen by human eyes. Characters seem to melt into the scenes, a compression of life and nature, again inviting future relationships between us and the world we are in.
Both installations were curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel as part of her three-year research project as Curatorial Fellow with TBA21-Academy, the research arm of the organisation that seeks to not only use art as a creative tool to consider the oceanic world, but as a methodology that intersects with science, politics, activism, policy, and conservation in quite unique ways. It is part of several intersecting strands of the TBA21 programme, all centring art as a process more than an outcome. [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.wallpaper.com/art/exhibitions-shows/ocean-space-exhibition-tba21
[Shown above, photo by Jacopo Salvi: Tessa Mars, a call to the ocean, 2025. Installation view of ‘otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua’ (other mountains, adrift beneath the waves), Ocean Space, Venice. Commissioned by TBA21–Academy.]